Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Born Conservative
(He is in fact a lifelong Christian).

The big lie. Do the math.

His fathers were non-practicing muslims.

His mother was an atheist, a daughter of non-practicing Christians of Methodist and Baptist backgrounds. She brought other religions into his home and raised him with a "healthy skepticism for organized religion" (a trait he says he is still proud to posess).

He was enrolled in a Catholic school (his mother said that the public school was not challenging him enough). He was listed on paperwork as being enrolled as a muslim and he attended koran class.

He said that it was Jeremiah Wright who "brought him to Jesus" so what was he for all of the years leading up to that?

When/where was he baptised?

Where is his new church?

Does he believe Jesus is Risen? The interview I found with Barack on religion (from 2004) has him saying that Jesus was an important historical figure.

He disagrees that one must follow Jesus to get salvation.

He's either a Unitarian, secular humanist, or atheist. But he isn't a Christian.

16 posted on 10/28/2008 10:49:47 AM PDT by weegee (James Brown sang: "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing, Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself".)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]


To: weegee
2004 Interview: Obama Talks about Jesus, Heaven and Sin June 3, 2008

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2111204/posts?

“OBAMA: Right. Jesus is a historical figure for me, and he’s also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher. And he’s also a wonderful teacher. I think it’s important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.”

Obama: “There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they're going to hell.” GG: You don’t believe that?
OBAMA: I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That’s just not part of my religious makeup.

[snip]

GG: What is sin?

OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham#Religion Religion

A “friend” from high school has said that Dunham “touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue.”[6] Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked if her mother was an atheist, said, “I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognise that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”[19] “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”[20]

In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, “My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess... In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”[21] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, “I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known.”[22] Religion for her was “just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives,” Obama wrote.[20] In 2007 Obama described his mother as “a Christian from Kansas.” “I was raised by my mother,” he continued. “So, I’ve always been a Christian.”[23][24] Also in 2007, he said in a speech, “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution.”[1]

The first mention I find of religion in this lengthy Time Magazine article is on page 4 http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524-4,00.html

“Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son's room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn't afford the élite international school and worried he wasn't challenged enough. After two years at the Catholic school, Obama moved to a state-run elementary school closer to the new house. He was the only foreigner, says Ati Kisjanto, a classmate, but he spoke some Indonesian and made new friends.”

So he went to a Catholic school briefly because she thought it might be a better school.

On page 5 of the article, there is this:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524-5,00.html

“Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, but Obama’s household was not religious. ‘My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew,’ Obama said in a 2007 speech. ‘But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I.’”

What is a “healthy skepticism of religion as an institution” for a devout Christian?

18 posted on 10/28/2008 10:55:05 AM PDT by weegee (James Brown sang: "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing, Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself".)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 16 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson